


give that twist of grace

by glorious_spoon



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Dubious Consent, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:46:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27897769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Behind the doors under Neibolt, Richie and Eddie encounter a memory that Richie really would rather have forgotten.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 70
Collections: Consent Issues Exchange 2020





	give that twist of grace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).



> A treat fic for **scorpiod** , for the prompt: _Pennywise taking the form of Eddie._
> 
> Specific warnings in the end notes. Title is from 'Black Crow' by Angus & Julia Stone.

It all goes to hell even faster than Eddie expected, which has to be some kind of record.

They scatter as Pennywise gives chase, shrieking laughter. Richie yanks him along through the twisting maze of tunnels, his fingers bruisingly tight; he keeps swearing under his breath, but Eddie is paying way more attention to the giant fucking _teeth_ snapping behind them, so he doesn’t understand at first when Richie comes to a stop so suddenly that Eddie almost crashes into him.

There’s a wall blocking their way. Incongruously, three rotting white doors are set in its stone face, labeled in something that Eddie very much doubts is red paint. _Scary, Very Scary, Not Scary At All_.

“Okay, okay, he’s fucking with us—”

“ _Richie_ ,” Eddie hisses. The crashing behind them is getting closer.

“They’re flipped, he’s fucking with us,” Richie says, and yanks open the _Very Scary_ door. Drumming footsteps and high girlish laughter echo out of the dark and then Betty Ripsom’s legs skitter toward them. Richie yells, slamming the door. A long snaking limb with teeth at the end of it jabs toward them out of the darkness behind them, snapping blindly.

“Not flipped, _not_ flipped,” Eddie yelps.

“Fine, let’s just try one of the other—” Richie breaks off, wide-eyed. There are more gory letters crawling across the wood like they’re being painted on by an invisible hand:

_WANT TO PLAY_

_TRUTH_

_OR_

**_DARE?_ **

This time, the teeth just barely miss them. Richie seems frozen in place.

“Okay, come on, come the fuck on,” Eddie babbles, yanking the nearest door open. The knob feels sickeningly greasy in his hand. He drags Richie inside just as the clown makes a final lunge, and then they’re falling into blackness.

He lands hard on packed dirt. Richie tumbles down on top of him and rolls away with a groan.

“Fucking _ow_ ,” he says, climbing to his feet. He hauls Eddie up too, and Eddie lets him do it, blinking in the sudden light as their surroundings become clear.

It’s the clubhouse. It’s the clubhouse as it was when they were kids, cozy and comfortably cluttered, the posters on the wall bright and undamaged by twenty-five years of mildew and dust. Warm sunlight spills in from the open trapdoor above them, and the hammock is swaying slightly as a lanky adolescent Richie propels it idly with one foot on the ground, comic book in his lap.

“What the fuck,” Eddie whispers, moving closer to his Richie. Their elbows bump; Richie tenses but doesn’t move away. 

“Richie?” a voice calls from above. A familiar voice, though it takes him a moment to place it: his own voice, high and youthful. A moment later, he’s climbing down: skinny and small in red gym shorts, cast on his arm. It’s _that_ summer, then. Neither of their younger counterparts seem aware that their battered middle-aged selves have invaded the scene.

“What are you doing here, Eds?” Richie asks without looking up from his comic book. “I thought your mom had you on lockdown.”

“Yeah, well, I snuck out,” Eddie says. “I wanted to see you.”

Beside him, Richie stiffens suddenly, then breathes, “Ohhh, _fuck_ , not this shit again.”

“What?”

“We gotta—come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Richie is pale under the grime; he’s staring at the scene before them with an expression like a man tilting off the edge of a cliff. His hand grasps blindly at Eddie’s sleeve to tug him back. There’s no door behind them, though; just the dry, dusty wall, showering silt over their shoulders when they hit it.

“Fucking _come on_ , help me find a door, I remember this and we seriously need to—”

“—what, go get eaten by a giant _spider_?” Eddie retorts, but he starts looking too, obedient to the obvious fear in Richie’s voice even if he doesn’t understand it. 

He pauses though, startled, as the younger Eddie climbs into the hammock. Eddie remembers shoving his way into that hammock more times than he can count, at least until Richie finally lost interest in it halfway through the summer and abandoned it to the rest of the Losers, but it was never like this. There’s none of what he now recognizes as a desperate attempt at plausible deniability. His younger self lands not just on top of Richie but straddling him, bracketing his hips with his knees. Beneath him Richie goes still, wide-eyed.

“Eds?” he asks.

“You’re not reading that, are you?” Eddie asks, and plucks the comic book out of his hands, letting it drop on the floor beside them in a flurry of pages like a dying butterfly.

“I kind of was, actually…”

“I got something better,” Eddie says, and without any warning he dips his head and presses his mouth to Richie’s.

Richie makes a soft, startled noise, then reaches up to cup his cheek, careful and sweet. “Eddie,” he murmurs, when they break apart. “Eddie, holy shit.”

What the _fuck._

“This isn't a memory,” Eddie says blankly. It can’t be. It _can’t_ be. “This didn’t happen.”

Beside him, Richie chokes on a laugh. “Oh, yeah, it totally did.”

“But I don’t remember—”

“I know you don’t,” Richie says shortly. Eddie glances at him, but he’s feeling along the cracks of the wall like he’s looking for a hidden seam, and doesn’t meet his eyes. “Look, just fucking help me find the door.”

There’s no way. There is absolutely no way that after everything he just _forgot_ kissing Richie like this, fierce and hungry enough to draw a soft, ragged sound from his mouth. Hungry in a way that Eddie didn’t think he was capable of at that age.

In a way that seems—like too much, actually. It’s quickly veering away from a sweet first kiss into heavy make-out territory. Eddie has one hand fisted in Richie's hair, dragging him up into the kiss; his other hand is pulling at Richie's shirt, shoving it up, baring skin.

“Wait, wait, wait,” the younger Richie says, tearing his mouth away. “Eddie, hang on a second— _Eddie_ —”

“You want this, don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, I do, I really do, just— _ow._ Just stop for a second, okay?”

“ _Richie_ , you’re going to _let me_ ,” Eddie croons, then drops his head to bite at Richie’s throat in a way that seems almost vicious _._ Teeth bared, digging deep into his skin. “You’re going to let me do whatever I want, because you want it too.”

Richie jerks underneath him, letting out a pained grunt, and tries to shove him away. “Eds, stop it— _stop_ it, that fucking hurts—”

“—you want it so bad you’ll _choke_ —”

The penny drops, finally, in a wash of cold.

“That,” Eddie says, then swallows. He’s never been the one with the weak stomach, but he suddenly feels like he might puke. “That wasn’t me.”

“Yeah, I kinda fuckin’ caught on when you grew about six hundred extra teeth and tried to eat my face,” Richie says flatly, and starts on the next slat

Which means that until then, he thought it was really Eddie. Eddie knows that he should be helping find the door, but he just feels frozen, watching the scene play out on the world’s most intimate stage.

The hammock twists wildly, his own youthful voice cackling with manic glee as not-Eddie reaches down between them and does something that makes Richie cry out, a sharp, agonized sound, and then struggle away. He hits the floor in a flailing bundle of limbs. It pursues him, still laughing, skipping to the side when Richie tries to dodge away. His face is red and streaked with tears, his glasses askew. He looks horribly, horribly young.

Eddie takes a step forward, unthinking. “We have to—”

“It’s not real,” Richie snaps. “It already happened, I got away, let's _go_.”

“Did you, Richie?”

That’s the clown’s voice. The clown’s voice coming from Eddie’s own youthful mouth; his head twisted back toward them with eyes gleaming like blank coins. Long jagged teeth dig into his lower lip, distending the bottom half of his face, but the rest of it is still, horribly, _Eddie’s_. It’s like he’s back up in Neibolt, watching Stan’s rotting, grinning, mutilated head cackle as it sprouted legs.

And then tried to eat Richie’s face. It’s becoming a theme.

“Did you get away? Did you really? There was some part of you that always remembered, wasn’t there? It was there under the surface every time anyone kissed you, for the rest of your miserable little life. Every time someone touched you, every time they got too close. Like there was something rotten _festering_ inside of you.”

The clown is close now. It’s—It’s way too fucking close, and Richie seems frozen in place, and Eddie doesn’t think this is a memory anymore. It’s close, and It’s changing, getting taller and less human. Its skin starts to peel away, splitting like overripe fruit to reveal rotting flesh beneath. An awful stench washes over them, and Eddie thinks, _oh god oh fuck it’s the fucking leper—_

He grabs at Richie as Its face unzips into a wet, gaping, shark-toothed grin, grabs at him and yanks him back, and then there, mercifully, is the door behind them, swinging open under his frantic grasping fingers to spill them back into the tunnel.

He slams it shut and stumbles back, dragging Richie with him, sucking in air that feels sharp and cold in his lungs after the stuffy heat of the clubhouse. There’s crashing in the distance. The clown is screaming laughter, still. It’s like they blipped out of reality for five minutes and blipped right back in where they left.

“What the fuck,” Eddie gasps, staring back. The doors are gone. In their place is a blank rock wall.

Richie shudders under his hand, then shrugs him off and takes a couple of steps back.

“Well,” he says finally, quiet and raw. “That was a fun fucking trip down memory lane.”

Eddie starts to reach for him, then stops when Richie flinches. “Rich—”

“Look, man.” He waves a hand vaguely back toward the cave. He’s trembling visibly. “Let’s just—we should go. Help the rest of them.”

He starts back toward the cavern without waiting to see if Eddie is coming, and Eddie has to jog to catch up with his long strides. The crashing and screaming is getting louder. There’s still a part of him that wants to curl up in a corner and hide, but the rest of his friends are still back there, and Richie is still moving, and that means Eddie has to keep going too.

He bumps Richie’s shoulder, not completely intentional, as the tunnel narrows. Richie glances down at him but doesn’t flinch this time, so Eddie leans into him and says, “You got away.”

“Yeah,” Richie mutters.

“You got away, and we’re gonna kill this clown, and we're gonna dance the Macarena on its fucking grave.”

Richie laughs sharply, sounding startled. "I'd pay good money to see that."

"Then let's go," Eddie says. And then, because he's feeling suddenly brave, "Hey. Back then, if you ever had—"

“Come on,” Richie interrupts quickly. “Let’s just get this shit over with.”

He looks so pained that Eddie shuts his mouth, but he keeps close to Richie as they step back into the fray.

* * *

A few hours later they stand in the sunlight, watching 29 Neibolt crumble into the earth. Eddie rubs at his bleeding shoulder, which hurts in a numb, distant kind of way. Everything seems kind of numb and distant, like the reality of it hasn’t quite sunk in yet. For him, at least. A little ways away, Mike hauls Bill into a tight hug and doesn’t let go. Bev and Ben are holding hands.

Eddie winces and lets his hand drop. There’s blood on it, but not much. It’s not a very deep cut, although it’ll probably need both stitches and a thorough disinfecting once they get to the hospital. He’s less concerned about that than he probably should be right now.

He takes a breath, then says, quietly, “Look, Rich, about what I said earlier.”

Richie gives him a sidelong look, and Eddie keeps staring at the pile of rubble, the dust rising up. He remembers the leper crawling out from under the porch, rotting and grinning and offering to touch him, the thing wearing his face climbing on top of Richie in the hammock. There’s a snarled tangle of anger and regret in the pit of his stomach.

“Eddie,” Richie says finally. His voice is startlingly gentle. “You don’t have to...”

“No, I just—I would have. If it had been me, if you’d kissed me, I would have let you.” He takes a breath. “I wanted it, I think. I was just—stupid. And scared. And then you never, after that summer—you never got in the hammock again.”

“Yeah, three guesses why,” Richie says dryly.

“I’m sorry.”

Richie gives him a startled look. “It’s not your fault, Eds. It wasn’t you.”

“I know that, but it was still—it looked like me, so.” He looks down, twisting his hands together. “I just wish—”

He stops again.

It’s been twenty-seven years. He’s fucking _married_. Not to mention that they’re both freshly traumatized, bruised and bleeding and drenched in stinking greywater. He can’t imagine a worse moment for the revelation that he apparently _still_ wants to kiss Richie Tozier, but there it is.

Richie gives him another moment, then bumps Eddie’s good elbow lightly with his. “Hey. Clown’s dead.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. And then, wonderingly, “Yeah, holy shit, we actually did it.”

“Hell yeah we did,” Richie says. “So you owe me the Macarena.”

“That’s—not—” Eddie splutters, completely derailed. “I’m not going to fucking actually do that, asshole, it was a metaphor.”

Richie is grinning, though, broad and genuine, and that makes it worth it. “Well, fine, if you’re going to chicken out.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie sighs, but he tilts toward Richie like a falling tree until they’re leaning together, holding each other up. Richie loops one long arm around his shoulders and holds him close, and Eddie closes his eyes, and it’s pretty much perfect.

At least for a moment, until Richie starts swaying, jostling him gently back and forth and singing softly, off-key and with no discernable sense of rhythm, “ _Dale a tu cuerpo alegría, Macarena—_ ”

“Oh my god, fuck you, _fuck you_ ,” Eddie says, slapping at Richie’s chest with his free hand without actually releasing him. “You’re the fucking worst, I hate you.”

“I know you do,” Richie says. He presses a smiling kiss to the crown of Eddie’s head as Bill and Mike and Ben and Bev move closer, and they all stand there together, watching Neibolt vanish into the earth.

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: Pennywise disguises himself as Eddie to initiate a sexual encounter with Richie when he's a teenager. Richie and Eddie witness the whole memory as adults. It doesn't go beyond making out, but it's clearly a traumatic experience for Richie.


End file.
